The Spanish Civil War Edition
That
Spain fought a tooth and nail civil war in the 1930s, leading up to
World War Two, is of course well known, but the version of it remembered
by most people, and even by quite a few historians, is mostly bunk.
The
common popular view of the war is that nasty Spanish fascist in the
Spanish army launched a war against the republican democracy loving
legitimate government and squashed democracy in the name of fascism.
That didn't happen.
In
reality, Spain's pre civil war government was extremely weak and
unstable and was very obviously rocketing towards falling into
Communism. That instability wasn't novel for the time, there were a lot
of European governments that were having trouble sustaining democracy,
in part because their experiment with democracy was quite young and
quite a few political parties had no real concept of being more loyal to
the country and the system than themselves. The more unstable of them
tended to teeter between Communism and Fascism in the 1930s, with Italy
and Germany of course falling into Fascism. Other countries rocked back
and forth, like France, but survived with democracies in tact. Others
fell into other forms of totalitarianism. Poland fell into a socialist
dictatorship, Austria into a right wing dictatorship, Hungary had a
Communist uprising, and so on. In Spain, it was pretty clear that it
was reaching the end of its democratic days and was going to fall into
some sort of left wing radical government.
The Army did
revolt against the government, that's quite true, but contrary to myth
it wasn't all Francisco Franco. Franco wasn't even the most senior of
the rebels, and he wasn't in Spain, but in Morocco, when the revolt
broke out. He did rise to leadership of it, however.
But,
contrary to the common myth, he wasn't a Fascist and the war wasn't one
between Fascism and democracy. It was one between the hard
right/military and Communism.
Spain had a fascist
party, the Falange, but Franco never joined it. It contributed members
to his various governments over the years, but at no point did it ever
dominate it. Spain also had a monarchist party, the Carlist, that
Franco was quite sympathetic with, but he never joined that either. He
was basically a military dictator of the Spanish type, but he used
parties that were fellow travelers with him. Those groups had nowhere
else they could go, as Franco was the only game in town.
As
for the Spanish Republicans, there were no doubt some democrats in that
movement early on, and some officers in the Spanish army went with the
Republicans. But the Republicans were radical to start with and very
quickly became more radical. And when it appeared that they would win,
the Communist took the opportunity to begin to eliminate other radicals
within the movement, acting as it turned out prematurely. That was to
Communist type, as the Communist always wiped out competition once
they'd won, and in Spain's case, they just acted too soon.
So
why all the romance about the Republican cause and the common view of
the war, when in real terms the Spanish Civil War belongs more to the
revolutions of the 20s and 30s and is uniquely Spanish in nature? Well,
the answer is World War Two.
Because the Italians
first, and the Germans, backed the Nationalist (with the USSR backing
the Republicans), and because the Republicans lost, it's been easy and
inevitable to recast the war as "a dress rehearsal for World War Two."
It wasn't in any way. But it's been commonly viewed through the thick
lens of the Second World War which has allowed people to grossly
simplify the war and completely misunderstand it. It's also let foreign
volunteers to the Republican side off the hook, as they've been
re-imagined as armed democrats, rather than Communist dupes, as they
really tended to be.
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